Hopefully I'm getting better at this. I'm looking at old emails,
thinking about things that happened in the mean time, and instead of
simply appending it all the an existing blog post, I'm trying to
look for a new “beat” in the story. And if I find one, I’m going to
try and post a new article. Like this one.
I'm still ruminating on the idea of how to write, together alone. Back in 2021 I sent an email to @Greta@fosstodon.org, author of Gretzuni, where I was talking about some ideas that are somewhere in the greater area of collaborative creative writing. In a way, this page is a follow-up to Wiki culture and The potential of interaction.
One idea I keep thinking of is encyclopedic writing. We're used to thinking that all the pages on a wiki are written, reviewed and edited by all the authors, somehow. But it doesn't have to be like that.
Looking at the blogging world these days, or the ideas of Federated Wiki, it seems that people would love to freely draw inspiration from other texts they read – and integrate them into their own texts. Read, copy, integrate.
Notice that technology and software no longer show up in the list above. From what I can tell, we don't need tech to enable this. We already have a world where we can "read, copy, integrate." What we need is a shared understanding of copyright. Namely, we need to understand that if we're not authors trying to sell our works but people living a life in text and trying to grow as people, then we don't need the benefits of copyright. We don't benefit from collecting societies giving us some money. We don't benefit from our readers being shackled by DRM (digital "rights" management – more like digital *restrictions* management, right?). We don't benefit from people being crushed by police, lawyers and judges for violations of copyright. Lives are being destroyed in our names and we don't want that.
My claim is that we have the technology. We have the mindset. We just need to do it.
Let me go back to that email I wrote in 2021. I was trying to think of other ways to collaborate. One idea I had goes back to how the very first encyclopedia was written. At least I think that is how it was written. Somebody has a project, like Diderot's Encyclopédie, and farms out the individual articles. Similarly, somebody collecting design patterns like Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language could group them and farm out groups like "design patterns for roads", "design patterns for houses", "design patterns for roofs", and so on. The result looks like a collection of articles, like an encyclopedia, and the process was collaborative because many people contributed, but not every person touched every page. You could create subsets of these pages and take them elsewhere.
The very first wiki was the Portland Pattern Repository and it did not work like that. You could contribute a pattern by creating a page, and everybody could edit everybody else's pages and create more pages at will and the result was novel and exciting and a game changer but the result was not a pattern repository. The result was in a different category altogether.
So given that I don't think wikis will make a great comeback, and given that I don't think people really want that wiki explosion "in a different category altogether", the question is: what do we drop? Which elements do we not incorporate?
So this is what interests me right now: How to collaborate with strangers in a wiki page, but without going all-in on the wiki concept, without having Wikipedia as the goal. Could we collaborate by thinking up a number of pages and articles that need to get written, assign them, and then collaborate, pick, decide, manage, distribute, and write. And then wrangle, edit, assemble and publish. It's still hard, but it's smaller in scope than "contribute to Wikipedia" and follows the model of writing articles for a journal, for the proceedings of a conference, for a book.
Perhaps it would work.
#Wikis #Writing